A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

—Robert A. Heinlein

IEM is easier to type than “in-ear headphones” and has become the defacto generic term for them, just like “monitor” has become to mean any stand mount/bookshelf speaker.

Anyway, over the past few years the market has flooded with cheap and very good “IEM-s” by manufacturers like Moondrop, Truthear and others. 30€ can get you a pair that follows Harman curve quite closely and has low enough distortion to allow EQ. Generally they use 10mm dynamic drivers instead of balanced armatures, but they also have more expensive multi-way BA and DD/BA options.

In short, high quality IEM style headphones have become a commodity and you don’t need to be an audiophile or muso who’s willing to pay hundreds for Shure SE535-s.

A pair of 40€ Denons is not really an “investment piece”, even though they have lasted me for 10 years.

If they were wired I bet you’d have to untangle them

I never have to untangle my IEM cables. A civilized person keeps their IEM-s in the carry case when not in use.

Comes in handy at work all the time when I need to test a piece of equipment.

And the best-bang-for-buck IEM-s still are wired only. Have my sights set on Moondrop Lans for xmas.

Back the fuck up! If you only have one copy, you have none.

For a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom to create value.

Shareholders are the real customers.

People who buy the products become a resource to extract value from.

The very day Hamas attack happened I suspected that there’s no way Israel’s intelligence orgs, some of the best in the world, did not know about the plan for the attack way before it happened. This whole affair stinks to the high heavens.

Obviously somewhere along there were some hubs that weren’t obvious to the naked eye.

Probably the port on your laptop was on a hub built onto the mobo. If my understanding is right that’s how USB ports usually are connected: controller->hub->ports. If you open up device manager and go to USB controllers you’ll see several root hubs and hubs even when you have no external hubs or docks connected.

Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.

I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven’t run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.

The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.

I doubt 0.1…0.2 mm aluminium sheet metal is good for any scissors🙃

Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.

For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears

I have a very cheap pair of haircutting scissors. I’ve used them to cut thin aluminium sheet. Still work OK for trimming my beard. I’m an absolute monster🙃

As for knives, some 10 years ago I bought a cheap (I think 2 or 3 €) Swedish-made fixed blade with nylon grip—the kind contractors and builders use. Thing is pretty much indestructible, cutting open tin cans and splitting of splinters from logs for firestarter like it’s nothing. Has a nice carbon steel blade and used to have very nice hollow ground that has been long been downgraded to flat ground due to many, many sharpenings.

Probably it doesn’t quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it’s much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.

You’re right, of course, but my point is that it’s not only metal, punk and other “angry” music, or more precisely, music that is aesthetically an acquired taste. There’s a lot of mellow, danceable and catchy music that has themes other than “Ooh, baby, baby, yeah, aha”. That this sort of music is not played on radio is a completely different problem.

Take a listen to eg VNV Nation’s Tomorrow Never Comes and tell me it couldn’t be a nr. 1 hit on radio and in clubs. It has all the making of a good catchy pop song, yet has some very thoughtful and contemplative lyrics.

But that nobody outside “angry” genres seems to be doing it is what saddens me.

There’s a lot of “non-angry” (ie no thick distorted guitars and screamed vocals) music that has strong political themes and social commentary going on. A lot of folk, blues, EBM, EDM, reagge, dub is about the struggles of the working class, people of color etc, has anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation message.

Leslie fish
Asian Dub Foundation
Later VNV Nation (early works are stylistically more “angry”, but thematically similar)
Covenant
Chip Taylor
Shamen
And many more

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin works just as well as it’s always been, I don’t even need to do regular manual filter upgrades. Only two tweaks I did was disabling Vivaldi’s built-in adblocker for YT (triggered the player blocking while logged in) and installing the pop-up blocker script for TamperMonkey.

So, business as usual. Google can go’an’fuck 'emselves.

Removed by mod

If I can’t afford something, I watch ads

I can’t afford to pay 20€ per month–that’s more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.

I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one’s life, one that you simply can’t get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.

Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.

Lastly, I don’t give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don’t care about them as much as they don’t care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there’s nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I’m a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.